200 Existence Quotes

To talk about existence is to talk about the mysteries of life itself.

Who are we? What are we? How did we get here? What are we supposed to do with ourselves now that we are here? What happens to us when we are no longer here, if anything? And, what if we aren’t really here at all, at least not in the way we think we are?

All great questions that great men and women have tackled since the beginning of time! (See, e.g., “The Meaning of Life.”) As you can imagine, the answers depend on so many different variables, such as period of history, geography, culture, class, race, nationality, religion, and so on. But, there also seems to be some themes that transcend all time, space, and skin color boundaries. As with all things in life, choose what works for you and politely leave the rest for others to consider. It’s a small world after all—and getting smaller all the time!—so much so that there’s little room left for old prejudices, intolerance, and bigotry. We will be a “world nation.”

If some of these quotes seem confusing, please don’t be discouraged. I wouldn’t have understood most of them 20 years ago, and a few I would not have understood as late as a few years ago. There were even others that I still don’t understand, so I chose not to include them in case anyone asked me to explain them. How exciting that there are still so many things left in the world for me to learn! I hope you feel the same way, too! Otherwise, life would be crazy boring! : )

200 QUOTES ABOUT EXISTENCE

1. Cultivation of mind should be the ultimate aim of human existence.
- B. R. Ambedkar

2. Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.
- Hans Christian Anderson

3. Any existence deprived of freedom is a kind of death.
- Michael Aoun

4. Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.
- Aristotle

5. It’s the same thing that drives people to want to experience sexual pleasure or have one too many drinks. We all want to experience the other, and to get out of our daily existence.
- Adam Arkin

6. Surely one of the most visible lessons taught by the twentieth century has been the existence, not so much of a number of different realities, but of a number of different lenses with which to see the same reality.
- Michael Arlen

7. A nation devoid of art and artists cannot have a full existence.
- Kemal Ataturk

8. Time is a violent torrent; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by, and another takes its place, before this too will be swept away.
- Marcus Aurelius

9. An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.
- Honore de Balzac

10. Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
- Honore de Balzac

11. Life is a long lesson in humility.
- J. M. Barrie

12. Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
- Saint Basil

13. At a given moment, I open my eyes and exist. And before that, for all eternity, what was there? Nothing.
- Ugo Betti

14. Patterning your life around other’s opinions is nothing more than slavery.
- Lawana Blackwell

15. Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.
- William Blake

16. To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
- Henri Bergson

17. Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity.
- Werner von Braun

18. No man or woman can be strong, gentle, pure, and good, without the world being better for it and without someone being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.
- Phillips Brooks

19. The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed.
- Buddha

20. Do not interrogate silence because silence is mute; do not expect anything from the gods, nor should you try to bribe them with gifts, because it is in ourselves that we must look for liberation.
- Buddha

21. It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.
- Frederick Buechner

22. I pick my favourite quotations and store them in my mind as ready armour, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence.
- Robert Burns

23. Life is not an exact science, it is an art.
- Samuel Butler

24. To live is like to love—all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
- Samuel Butler

25. All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
- Samuel Butler

26. When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning—how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.
- Lord Byron

27. But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of.
- Lord Byron

28. What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.
- George Byron

29. The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
- Albert Camus

30. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers … This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me.
- Albert Camus

31. In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
- Albert Camus

32. The absurd of life is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the Universe.
- Albert Camus

33. I know that I have lived because I have felt, and, feeling giving me the knowledge of my existence, I know likewise that I shall exist no more when I shall have ceased to feel.
- Giacomo Casanova

34. The mind of a human being is formed only of comparisons made in order to examine analogies, and therefore cannot precede the existence of memory.
- Giacomo Casanova

35. People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.
- Anton Chekov

36. You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices.
- Deepak Chopra

37. There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
- E. M. Cioran

38. To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.
- E. M. Cioran

39. To me, human existence exists on a multiple level, not just on a two-dimensional level, not just having to be identified with what you do and what you say.
- Ornette Coleman

40. In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.
- Jeremy Collier

41. Every great discovery I ever made, I gambled that the truth was there, and then I acted in faith until I could prove its existence.
- Arthur H. Compton

42. The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
- Cyril Connolly

43. To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
- Joseph Conrad

44. Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
- Joseph Conrad

45. Money is to my social existence what health is to my body.
- Mason Cooley

46. All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity.
- James F. Cooper

47. Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
- William Cowper

48. The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
- Quentin Crisp

49. It’s not just for its influence on us, but to know that we can play a part in it, to understand the influence that we have outside our own existence.
- Siobhan Davies

50. After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.
- Richard Dawkins

51. The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
- Richard Dawkins

52. The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rational for our existence. … We are their survival machines.
- Richard Dawkins

53. Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
- Democritus

54. I doubt, therefore I think; I think, therefore I am.
- Rene Descartes

55. Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.
- Charles Dickens

56. The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the grain.
- Charles Dickens

57. In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.
- Charles Dickens

58. We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.
- Benjamin Disraeli

59. I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.
- Benjamin Disraeli

60. Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky

61. Being is a fiction invented by those who suffer from becoming.
- Coleman Dowell

62. My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.
- Arthur Conan Doyle

63. I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.
- Theodore Dreiser

64. The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.
- Albert Einstein

65. All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
- Albert Einstein

66. There are two ways to look at life. One is as though nothing is a miracle; the other is as though everything is.
- Albert Einstein

67. Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

68. We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that neither must we count upon it as quite certain to come, nor despair of it as quite certain not to come.
- Epicurus

69. What is the value of your existence?
- Stephen Evans

70. You exist only in what you do.
- Federico Fellini

71. I think of myself as being a relatively intelligent man who is open to a lot of different things; and, I think that questioning our purpose in life and the meaning of existence is something that we all go through at some point.
- Laurence Fishburne

72. The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
- E. M. Forster

73. Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.
- Anatole France

74. Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
- Erich Fromm

75. Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
- Erich Fromm

76. To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, “What’s it for?”
- Robert Fulghum

77. Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.
- John W. Gardner

78. And woven into the fabric of this harsh existence was music.
- Lesley Garrett

79. An “unemployed” existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
- Jose Ortega y Gasset

80. The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
- Jose Ortega y Gasset

81. I take pride in the creation of my wealth, in its existence and in the uses to which it has been and is being put.
- Paul Getty

82. Yes! To this thought I hold with firm persistence;
The last result of wisdom stamps it true;
He only earns his freedom and existence
Who daily conquers them anew.
- Goethe

83. Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.
- Goethe

84. Nothing exists except by virtue of a disequilibrium, an injustice. All existence is a theft paid for by other existences; no life flowers except on a cemetery.
- Remy de Gourmont

85. Have friends. ‘Tis a second existence.
- Baltasar Gracian

86. Man has the possibility of existence after death. But possibility is one thing and the realization of the possibility is quite a different thing.
- Bret Harte

87. Inject a few raisins of conversation into the tasteless dough of existence.
- O. Henry

88. Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.
- Heraclitus

89. Life is half spent before we know what it is.
- George Herbert

90. This happiness consisted of nothing else but the harmony of the few things around me with my own existence, a feeling of contentment and well-being that needed no changes and no intensification.
- Herman Hesse

91. The science which teacheth arts and handicrafts is merely science for the gaining of a living; but the science which teacheth deliverance from worldly existence, is not that the true science?
- Thomas Hobbes

92. The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
- Eric Hoffer

93. A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

94. Philosophy, most broadly viewed, is the critical survey of existence from the standpoint of value.
- Sidney Hook

95. All forms of self-defeating behavior are unseen and unconscious, which is why their existence is denied.
- Vernon Howard

96. Every life is its own excuse for being.
- Elbert Hubbard

97. I think it’s wrong that so many people pass on from this existence, and take all their knowledge with them.
- Rex Hunt

98. The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.
- William Hurt

99. The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.
- Thomas Huxley

100. Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.
- Elizabeth Janeway

101. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
- Thomas Jefferson

102. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
- Carl Jung

103. The world begins to exist when the individual discovers it.
- Carl Jung

104. Hold it the greatest sin to prefer existence to honor, and for the sake of life to lose the reasons for living.
- Juvenal

105. Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.
- Franz Kafka

106. Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn! Look to this Day! For it is Life, the very Life of Life. In its brief course lie all the Verities and Realities of your Existence. The Bliss of Growth, The Glory of Action, The Splendor of Beauty; For Yesterday is but a Dream, And To-morrow is only a Vision; But To-day well lived makes Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness, And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope. Look well therefore to this Day! Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!
- Kalidasa

107. We owe our existence to our parents, but we actually didn’t have a choice.
- Leon Kass

108. The way I see things, the way I see life, I see it as a struggle. And there’s a great deal of reward I have gained coming to that understanding—that existence is a struggle.
- Harvey Keitel

109. Whichever theory we adopt to give a rational explanation of human existence, that theory must take into account and explain the mental nature we see at work in all modern communities.
- Arthur Keith

110. People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.
- Soren Kierkegaard

111. I think one’s sexuality can be the center of life, and coming out and discovering your sexuality is something that really can define your existence.
- Mia Kirshner

112. Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.
- Karl Kraus

113. The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
- Milan Kundera

114. A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.
- Milan Kundera

115. For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
- Milan Kundera

116. We don’t exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.
- D. H. Lawrence

117. Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
- D. H. Lawrence

118. I think everyone has some fascination with what’s outside our existence. It’s a constant journey to find the truth.
- Nicholas Lea

119. The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.
- John Locke

120. I don’t need a man to rectify my existence. The most profound relationship we’ll ever have is the one with ourselves.
- Shirley MacLaine

121. We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.
- Anne Sullivan Macy

122. Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
- Norman Mailer

123. Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes—every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man.
- Orison Swett Marden

124. Existence is a party. You join after its started and you leave before its finished.
- Elsa Maxwell

125. So we can’t go backwards, we can only go where the evolutionary trajectory is taking us and attune our ideas about ourselves and our existence to that course.
- Thom Mayne

126. Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.
- Donella Meadows

127. There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
- Carson McCullers

128. Join me in my quest for a greater understanding of our existence. Join me in my desire for a greater self. Join me as I seek the humility to love and understand my fellow man.
- Bryant H. McGill

129. The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
- Henry Louis Mencken

130. In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for “finding himself.” If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
- Thomas Merton

131. In the battle of existence, Talent is the punch; Tact is the clever footwork.
- Wilson Mizner

132. The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
- Vladimir Nabokov

133. Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
- Vladimir Nabokov

134. The first moments of sleep are an image of death; a hazy torpor grips our thoughts and it becomes impossible for us to determine the exact instant when the “I,” under another form, continues the task of existence.
- Gerard De Nerval

135. The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

136. In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence; and loathing seizes him.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

137. The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

138. That is the exploration that awaits you! Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.
- Leonard Nimoy

139. Perhaps one reason for the falling-off of belief in a continuance of conscious existence is to be found in the quality of life that most of us lead. There is not much in it with which, in any kind of reason, one can associate the idea of immortality.
- Albert J. Nock

140. Why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists solely to make money. Money is an important part of a company’s existence, if the company is any good. But a result is not a cause. We have to go deeper and find the real reason for our being.
- David Packard

141. Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.
- Nam June Paik

142. Man is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes; the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him, in an impenetrable secret.
- Blaise Pascal

143. The life of inner peace, being harmonious and without stress, is the easiest type of existence.
- Norman Vincent Peale

144. Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing.
- Charles Sanders Peirce

145. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force … We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.
- Max Planck

146. It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.
- Edgar Allan Poe

147. The greatest writers of this age … are aware of the mystery of our existence.
- J. B. Priestley

148. The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one other person.
- Vi Putnam

149. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
- Ayn Rand

150. Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience—by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.
- Herbert Read

151. We spend our lives talking about this mystery. Our life.
- Jules Renard

152. Myth expresses in terms of the world—that is, of the other world or the second world—the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence.
- Paul Ricoeur

153. There are some things that we know are just not as pleasant as the lies that we tell ourselves, and in that sense in order to endure existence everyone endures a certain amount of dishonesty in their everyday lives.
- Todd Rundgren

154. I’m laughing because I know the secret of life. And the secret of life is that I have validated my existence. I know that I am worth more than my house, my bank account, or any physical thing.
- Carlos Santana

155. The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
- George Santayana

156. The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
- George Santayana

157. I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But, in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
- Jean-Paul Sartre

158. One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.
- Jean-Paul Sartre

159. Like Leibniz’s possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.
- Friedrich Von Schlegel

160. The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

161. We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

162. As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.
- Albert Schweitzer

163. There’s a time when you have to explain to your children why they’re born, and it’s a marvelous thing if you know the reason by then.
- Hazel Scott

164. One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.
- Walter Scott

165. Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.
- John Searle

166. I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it in to existence or clearing the way for it.
- George Bernard Shaw

167. We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence … on pain of liquidation.
- George Bernard Shaw

168. Take care to get what you like in life, or you will be forced to like what you get.
- George Bernard Shaw

169. The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.
- Georg Simmel

170. Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.
- Sydney Smith

171. An unexamined life is not worth living.
- Socrates

172. With all our mastery over the powers of Nature we have adhered to the view that the struggle for existence is a permanent and necessary condition of life.
- Frederick Soddy

173. Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
- Susan Sontag

174. We insist on believing we are free, even if between two opposite wishes we disclose the best and choose the worst.
- Spinoza

175. The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.
- Madame de Stael

176. The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.
- Rabindranath Tagore

177. We don’t live as we wish, but as we can.
- Terence

178. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
- Henry David Thoreau

179. Being is the great explainer.
- Henry David Thoreau

180. I am astonished at the singular pertinacity and endurance of our lives. The miracle is, that what is is, when it is so difficult, if not impossible, for anything else to be; that we walk on in our particular paths so far, before we fall on death and fate, merely because we must walk in some path; that every man can get a living, and so few can do anything more. So much only can I accomplish ere health and strength are gone, and yet this suffices.
- Henry David Thoreau

181. Let us wander where we will, the universe is built round about us, and we are central still.
- Henry David Thoreau

182. The person who is searching for his own happiness should pull out the dart that he has stuck in himself, the arrow-head of grieving, of desiring, of despair.
- Tripitaka

183. The greatest of victories is the victory over oneself.
- Tripitaka

184. Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
- Mark Twain

185. To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.
- Mark Twain

186. Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.
- John Tyndall

187. From wonder into wonder existence opens.
- Lao Tzu

188. Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
- John Updike

189. Time is the most precious element of human existence. The successful person knows how to put energy into time and how to draw success from time.
- Denis Waitley

190. Once you accept the existence of God—however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him—then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things.
- Morris West

191. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.
- Morris West

192. It is through Art and through Art only that we can realize our perfection; through Art and Art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
- Oscar Wilde

193. In short, we cannot grow, we cannot achieve authentic discovery, and our eyes cannot be cleansed to the truly beautiful possibilities of life, if we simply live a neutral existence.
- Armstrong Williams

194. Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.
- Robert Anton Wilson

195. The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
- Tom Wolfe

196. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony.
- Elizabeth Wurtzel

197. When you use words, you’re able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.
- Gao Xingjian

198. Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.
- Lyn Yutang

199. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.
- Frank Zappa

200. What is a lie? It is to say what is real is not real. It is to deny the existence of what exists.
- Peter Nivio Zarlenga

CONCLUSION

In the end, life is always what you make of it. Be awesome! Be your own hero! : )

[Note: More existence quotes in the comments section below! : ) Rather than changing the title of this post—which would require changing all the links, too—I simply added the ones I found later while working on other quote lists.]

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[For “The Meaning of Life,” click here.]

[For “200 Happiness Quotes,” click here.]

[For “300 Friendship Quotes,” click here.]

[For “100 Love and Marriage Quotes,” click here.]

[For “100 Interesting Quotes by Women,” click here.]

[For “100 Blessings Quotes,” click here.]

[For “300 Dream Quotes,” click here.]

[For “100 Health Quotes,” click here.]

[For “200 Hero Quotes,” click here.]

[For “200 Work Quotes,” click here.]

[For “100 Money Quotes,” click here.]

[For “200 Rich Quotes,” click here.]

[For “200 Poor Quotes,” click here.]

[For “125 Sarcastic Quotes,” click here.]

[For “25 Statements to Happiness,” click here.]

[For “30 Statements for Great Relationships,” click here.]

[For all posts about different QUOTES, click here.]

[For more “Easy Steps to Success with People,” click here.]